by Kacey Ezell
Assassin
Book Eleven of The Revelations Cycle
By
Kacey Ezell and Marisa Wolf
PUBLISHED BY: Seventh Seal Press
Copyright © 2018 Kacey Ezell & Marisa Wolf
All Rights Reserved
License Notes
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only and may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This book is a work of fiction, and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are productions of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.
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Acknowledgements
I could never have completed this book without the help and support of a whole host of people. Most obviously, of course, is my talented and amazing coauthor. Thank you, Risa, for playing this game with me. It’s been a blast. Let’s do it again sometime. Also, special thanks go to Mark Wandrey for creating this amazing setting and universe. Thanks to you and Chris Kennedy for letting us play in your creation. We hope our catsassins are worthy. Lastly, but never leastly, thank you to EZ, Roo, and Bear, without whom I would be nothing.
–Kacey Ezell, December 2017
If you get a chance to write a novel with Kacey, I strongly recommend it. Thank you, lady, for all the badassery and, incidentally, the amazing friendship. I could not have done this without you. Chris and Mark, this universe is fantabulous—thanks for letting me muck around in it. To my parents for not laughing at me when I majored in English (oh, wait, you did. Thanks for that, too!), to Jeremy for letting me endlessly talk about catsassins, even in the middle of the night, and to Mary for making me step up my writing game. Love to you all. Finally, to my Uncle Bob, who read my first (terrible) novel when I was twelve. I wish you had gotten to hold this one in your hands. We miss you.
–Marisa Wolf, December 2017
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Cover Art by Ricky Ryan
Cover Design by Brenda Mihalko
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To my girls, because Mommy loves you. And to Pearl and Moxxi, my own sociopathic cuddlemonsters. Mommy loves you, too.
–KE
To Jeremy, for his patience when I disappear into my head, and to the dogs, for lack of same.
–MW
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Author Note:
The Depik are a mammalian analogue, giving live birth to placental kittens after a gestation slightly longer than a season. Depik mothers, called damas, nurse their kittens for roughly a season after birth, though the young kittens can survive on raw meat almost immediately. Young Depik are capable of reproducing at three years of age and are considered full adults after four. The typical Depik lifespan is approximately 18–20 years, though some venerable Depik have continued to lead active lives well into their twenties. As some of the terms may be unfamiliar, a glossary and a distance/time converter is in the back of this book.
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Contents
Author Note:
Contents
Hunting
Interesting Times
Recall
Discussions
Cataclysm
The Contract
Egress
Dilemma
No Plan Survives First Contact
Complications
Found
Convergence
Epilogue
Glossary
Distances on Khatash
Time on Khatash
About the Authors
Connect with Kacey Ezell Online
Connect with Marisa Wolf Online
Excerpt from Book One of The Psyche of War:
Excerpt from “Minds of Men:”
Excerpt from Book One of the Revelations Cycle:
Excerpt from “Cartwright’s Cavaliers:”
Hunting
He moved like water.
In the green dimness of perpetual twilight, the young male placed his fingerpads carefully on the thick, springy floor of the triple-canopy jungle. He glided forward as sleek muscles bunched and flowed into one another under his rusty orange fur. Long, moist plant tendrils reached down from above, brushing their wetness against his coat in the humid equatorial day.
Up ahead, his prey froze. The adult Cheelin had been grooming itself by the spring that bubbled up from the forest floor ahead. More than twice the Hunter’s size, the hexapedal animal was considered one of the most challenging of Khatash’s native prey species. Each of its six prehensile limbs ended in a venomous, stinging point that would deliver enough quintessential neurotoxin to kill an adult Hunter. This particular beast was male, as evidenced by his bulbous abdomen and triangular head. The females were sleeker and tended to hide better. Most male Cheelin didn’t care to hide. They were too used to being the biggest and baddest.
Until a Hunter found them.
This particular Hunter, who had gone by the name of Choking Deluge since shortly after his birth, continued to slide through the undergrowth toward the Cheelin. Others, perhaps, might have chosen to pause, lest the Cheelin detect some movement in the jungle. But Deluge kept going, for he realized that he was not the threat the Cheelin sensed.
The Cheelin reared back onto four legs and craned its head to look up into the canopy above. It let out a sort of coughing roar, and the coat of fine, wiry hairs that covered all but the underside of its tentacles puffed up in an attempt to make itself look bigger and scarier.
The jungle echoed with an answering screech of warning, and death arrowed down out of the canopy above, right into both of the Cheelin’s outstretched arms.
While dangerous, Cheelin were prey animals. They consumed only fruit and vegetative matter, and except for the adult males, tended to live in tightly knit family groups. Taking on a solitary male was challenge enough that very few predators on Khatash would try. In fact, Deluge knew of only two: Hunters like himself and the occasional Basreen.
The Basreen attacked from above, using the thin membranous “wings” that snapped out from its tubular body to slow its descent. Her descent, Deluge realized as he caught sight of her tail whipping through the air. Only females had ringed tails, with stingers of their own that carried a powerful paralytic.
She flew down and whipped her body around the Cheelin’s form, attempting to wrap around his armored neck joint. Deluge knew if she could manage to fully encircle the neck and anchor down, she would flex her powerful musculature and begin to cinch in bit by bit, until the Cheelin’s natural armor plate crumpled under the force, and he strangled himself. It was a slow process, but one good sting from her tail would dump enough toxin into his bloodstream to render the Cheelin immobile for a good long while.
If the Basreen could get her body fully around his neck. Which she didn’t.
The wily Cheelin reached up and caught the diving Basreen in midair. He shoved one of his tentacles deep into her mouth, which snapped instantly shut. Her powerful jaws and armored palate severed the stinging tip, and the Cheelin roared in pain as dark red blood spurted from the wound. Nevertheless, his other tentacle successfully caught the Basreen by her ringed tail, and he whipped her out and away from himself, causing more of his blood to fly in an arc through the wet heat of the jungle scene.
It smelled delicious. Deluge took another step forward and crouched in the darkened hollow underneath a rotting Rizel stalk. He would have gone closer, but the injured Cheelin blundered by as it flung the Basreen around some more, and Deluge d
idn’t feel like getting stepped on. Cheelin were heavy, and the suckers on the underside of their tentacles stung.
As Deluge watched, unnoticed, the Cheelin whipped the Basreen back across his body, which turned out to be a mistake. The Basreen managed to reach out and wrap itself around the joint where one of the Cheelin’s aft legs joined his abdomen. When the Cheelin hauled the Basreen back the other direction, she flexed her muscles and held fast, and his grip slid off the end of her tail.
The Basreen had long since folded in her membranes, leaving her looking like nothing so much as an elongated tube of muscle, which, truth be told, wasn’t far off. She used her strength to gather her body up and began climbing the Cheelin’s leg. He let out a deep, hoarse-sounding howl of distress that shook water droplets from the leaves above. He tried to use his forelegs to pull at the Basreen, to sting her, to try and tear her loose. But Deluge knew that Basreen skin was thick and nearly impervious to puncture wounds. If there was such a thing as perfectly flexible armor, the Basreen was wearing it.
When the Cheelin turned his back on Deluge’s hiding place in his frantic dance to escape, Deluge sprang. He leapt from the darkness under the wide, flat Rizel leaves and landed squarely on the Cheelin’s abdomen. The Cheelin, mid-howl, faltered as the new threat presented itself. Before the hexapod could reach up to grab at him with one of its unoccupied limbs, Deluge slashed his claws across the creature’s vulnerable eyes. The Cheelin screamed, and three of his arms flailed up, stingers glistening with drops of deadly poison at the tips. Deluge ducked one, grabbed onto another, and twisted himself up into a handspring that landed him on top of the creature’s head.
The third tentacle followed, and Deluge swatted it away with brute force as he dove down to the forest floor, still holding on to the Cheelin’s limb. The creature yanked and twisted, and nearly succeeded in getting away from Deluge, but the Hunter had wrapped the tentacle around his wrist and secured it by stabbing the stinger deep into the Cheelin’s own flesh. The toxin wouldn’t hurt him, of course, but it did prevent him from getting away.
Next order of business, Deluge thought, the Basreen. Less than half a heartbeat had elapsed since his initial leap from the undergrowth, and the arboreal predator was still working her way up onto the body of the Cheelin. Deluge reached out with his free hand and gripped her tail. She screeched in protest as he yanked hard enough to separate half her length from the Cheelin’s leg. Had she been prepared for him, he never would have succeeded, but apparently Deluge had caught the Basreen by surprise, because he was able to get enough slack in her body for his idea to work.
The blinded Cheelin, warned by the Basreen’s shriek, turned and surged in Deluge’s direction. The Hunter ducked and then came up hard under the creature’s abdomen, stabbing upward with the Basreen’s stinger in the vulnerable spot between the foremost set of legs.
The Cheelin froze, shuddered, then began to crumple. Deluge flung the Basreen away from himself and dove out of the way of the Cheelin’s toppling weight. The animal, wounded and paralyzed, crashed to the jungle floor. Deluge rolled up to his back feet and waited for a moment, but the Cheelin didn’t move. It was fully incapacitated.
He dropped back down to all four paws and stalked closer, scenting the air. The Basreen was nearby, and he didn’t know if she would contest his kill or not.
“Hunttttr,” she screeched in the way of her kind. Deluge froze and watched as she reared her elongated body up above the bulk of the Cheelin’s still-breathing corpse.
“Basreen,” Deluge said in return. Though a lower life form, the Basreen was a fellow-predator and deserved respect.
“Your kill,” the Basreen said, which surprised Deluge. As a species, they were not known for their generosity.
“You helped,” Deluge replied. “Shall we split the Cheelin?”
“Splittt,” the Basreen agreed. “Young to feed.”
“Ah, of course then. I will take the stingers and poison sacs. The meat is yours.”
“Good Hunttttr,” she said, and let out a kind of chittering sound that Deluge interpreted as pleasure. He blinked slowly at her and then drew his long knife for the first time in the process.
“Shall I kill the beast?”
“No kill. Meatttt bad.”
“Ah. It will spoil the meat if he dies? Fair enough. I will just cut the stingers, then.”
“Good. Young come now.”
Basreen were not a populous species. While not as rare as the Hunters themselves, Deluge had only seen a Basreen in the wild once before, so he felt a particular thrill as the mother Basreen sent out a two-note screech and no less than twenty small, tubular winged animals dove down from the canopy above. The young Basreen settled over the bulk of the Cheelin, their multihued hides creating a dizzying display of pulsing color as they fed.
“You have many young, Basreen.”
“Yes,” she said, and Deluge wondered if such a simple creature was capable of something like pride. “Good young.”
“Yes, it is good,” he agreed, and got to work slicing up the tips of the Cheelin’s tentacles. It wasn’t hard work, but it was a delicate thing to extract the stinger apparatus without puncturing the poison gland inside. By the time he was finished, the Cheelin had been reduced to a bloody skeleton covered in offal, and the Basreen and her young had disappeared.
“Good hunting, Basreen,” Deluge said as he slipped the last of the stingers into the pocket of the vest he’d worn for that purpose. The day had gone, and the darkness beneath the trees grew deeper as less sunlight filtered down from below.
“Good huntttting, Huntttttr,” came the distant farewell screech from the trees far above.
* * *
Deluge hadn’t needed the Cheelin’s meat to survive, but as he journeyed through the darkened jungle back toward the City, his stomach began to growl its empty displeasure at him. It became so distracting that he broke off his journey long enough to kill a small creeper to fill his belly. Though it was hardly sport to kill the slow moving, bulbous plant-eater, eating it did the trick, and the young Hunter made it to the edges of the City by dawn.
“The City” was Khatash Starport. When he was a young kit, Deluge had accompanied his Dama to the City once. He’d been wide-eyed with wonder at the sight of so many beings in one place. The tall metal and glass buildings had seemed so alien compared to the long, low slung tunnels of their Den. And though he’d grown up speaking the language of his Human molly, Deluge had never heard anything like the lyrical patois of the starport. It had teemed with life and activity. He’d thought it must be the most populous place in the universe.
He’d been very young.
Still, though, the City was usually good for a few laughs, and Deluge felt his spirits lift as he approached the edge of the trees and the paved streets of the starport. As the City was one of the few places on the planet not buried under triple-canopy jungle, Deluge took a moment to pull his dark-tinted dawn-goggles on to shade his sensitive eyes before he sauntered out into the equatorial sunlight.
Instantly, the sound seemed to change. Oh, he’d been hearing the noise of the City for a while, but it had been background to the native sounds of Khatash’s flora and fauna. Now, though, the hum of hovering vehicles and the dull roar of myriad languages all tangled together to take center stage in the Hunter’s sensitive ears. Overhead, a formation of Basreeni fighters streaked by with a distant shriek. The deadly little fighters were capable of incredible maneuvering in both space and atmosphere, and would shoot down any craft that strayed from the cone-shaped extraplanetary zone above the starport. Deluge thought of the fighter’s namesake he’d met in the jungle and smiled.
Though loud, the sounds were nothing to the assault on his olfactory senses. The musky wetness of the rainforest no longer dominated the air. Instead, he caught the scent of over a dozen life forms, native and alien both. Khatash Starport was the only place on the planet where an off-worlder could safely go without a clan sigil, and so it was quite the hub o
f interplanetary commerce. Having been out into the galaxy on contracts, Deluge had to admire the nerve of the merchants brave enough to come to Khatash. The deadly reputation of his people had spread far and wide, with good reason. Plus, Hunters valued their privacy, and the Council of Elders had decreed that alien could be summarily executed if it was determined they possessed knowledge they should not have.
Personally, Deluge found that particular law a bit capricious, but then, that was probably his unorthodox upbringing speaking. His Human molly was passionate about the thirst for knowledge, and she’d managed to instill at least some of that passion in each of the four of them. Susa had always told her kits that knowledge was power, but like all kinds of power, it had a danger and a price tag. He didn’t know all the details behind why her wise Human eyes had always seemed so sad and ancient when she said this, but he knew there was a deep story.
In any case, Deluge figured it was his own thirst for knowledge that made him love the City. Even now, returning pleasantly tired from a good hunt and wanting nothing so much as to fall into his own bed at the Den, he felt the life and vibrancy of the City lightening his mood. Especially when his nose caught the faintest whiff of spiced Khava meat amid all the other scents swirling around him. Khava were one of the largest fish that swam in Khatash’s great oceans, and when prepared correctly, their meat was a delicacy not to be missed. Deluge liked to think of himself as having a rather sophisticated palate, and after the bland nutrition of the jungle creeper, the taste of spiced Khava seemed just the thing. He turned his paws toward the source of that deliciously tempting aroma: the open-air market.